St. Petersburg Linguistic Society
Co-ordinator — Tatiana V. Chernigovskaya
St. Petersburg Psycholinguistic Seminar was founded by L.V.Sakharny and A.S. Stern in the 80-ies of the XX century. It unites researchers of St. Petersburg and some other cities of Russia. Most of the dissertations defended during the last 20 years have been discussed within the seminar. T.V.Chernigovskaya, currently being the head of St. Petersburg School of Psycholinguistics, was a secretary of the seminar from the very beginning. L.V.Sakharny was the first to start teaching a course in Psycholinguistics that later was acknowledged as one of the core course in the curriculum of the Department of General Linguistics. A.S. Stern, a student and a follower of L.R. Zinder was the author of courses in Statistics and in Psychology for linguists. Dozens of students of all levels could get education in this multidisciplinary field and continue their activity all over Russia and abroad. In 2000 Department of General Linguistics, being supported by the head of the department professor L.V. Verbitskaya and by the dean professor S.I.Bogdanov, announced specialization “Psycholinguistics” for the students of Philological faculty.
Psycholinguistics is a multidisciplinary and a synthesising scientific domain that evolved in the middle of the century as a cross-section of two traditional and well-formed disciplines. It was caused by an outburst of research in experimental linguistics and cogitology, speech production and processing, child language, speech and language pathology, the problem of language and mind, etc. To advance, new paradigms and methodologies were needed. But the first stage was reflecting and adapting the old paradigms and approaches that have already taken shape in linguistics and in psychology as well as in some other allied domains — from physiology to cognitive science and semiotics. Neurolinguistics — that was developed later — took another step to bring science and humanities still closer together: its issue is to bring to conformity linguistic and cognitive behaviour on the one hand and the corresponding brain structures — on the other. This led to the necessity of knowledge exchange within still more wide territory, i.e. neurosciences with their specifically medical aspects. It became evident that underestimation of any of the aspects of such principally multidimensional problems inevitably leads to misunderstanding the linguistic data. The approach turned out to be successful as was brilliantly demonstrated by the leading researchers and scholars in the field — from a linguist Roman Jakobson to a psychologist Lev Vygotsky and a neurologist Alexander Luria, a founder of Neurolinguistics.
Seminar’s activity is reflected in numerous grants received from Russian Foundation for Basis Research, Russian Scientific Foundation for Research in Humanities, Open Society Institute, etc. A special issue of “Language and Language Behaviour” (edited by T.Chernigovskaya and Erling Wande ) was published following International Nordic Neurolinguistic Symposium, organized by the seminar in St. Petersburg.
The seminar “Psycho- and Neurolinguistics” has vast connections with national and international colleagues, universities and scientific centres. The objective of the seminar is knowledge exchange of linguists and psychologists, medical scientists and physiologists, sociologists, teachers and speech pathologists. It welcomes original theoretical and experimental papers, critical surveys and case reports.
Monthly meetings take place at the Philological faculty of St. Petersburg University.